A Bureaucracy of One

Little Daft Punk

Little Big Planet meets Daft Punk

via Destructoid

Just Because You Can eat It Doesn't Mean It's Edible

Fast Food franchises I'll no longer willingly patronize:

McDonald's

Burger King

Wendy's

Taco Bell

Arctic Circle

Panda Express

and now...

KFC.

The Carl's Jr./Hardees franchise still gets a pass because of their Crisscut/Curly Fries.

The crap that passes for food at these places horrifies me.  It used to not bother me at all.  Hell, I used to eat almost exclusively at Taco bell for about ten years after college!  The Spicy Chicken Sandwich at Wendy's satisfied my hunger on multiples of multiple times, as did the Orange Chicken from Panda Express.  But now, just the idea of entering those places fills me dread nausea!  My bowels begin to quake in fear - loosening in anticipation of needing to pass the poisonous gestalts of Super Science and Arcane Magics as quickly as possible - and my blood pressure drops as my body tries to slow the flow of viscous life-fluid throw my digestive track, as the less of toxins absorbed, the better.

I mean, have seen what passes for Macaroni & Cheese at KFC recently?  That.  Ain't. FOOD!

Nay, instead it is some eldritch horror drawn straight from the rotting bowels of H.P. Lovercraft himself!  An amorphous gelatin that reeks of hells unfathomable and chemicals so corrosive that the EPA can't even classify them!  One taste, and your puny mortal mind will shrink in gibbering terror from the mass of Stygian information conveyed by your now-atrophied taste buds!  And then, as if the incipient destruction of all that you are at the tendrils of this horror were not enough, CLARITY bursts through noxious fog like a suppurating appendix, and wraps the shards of your psyche in its necrotic tentacles.  It is then that you KNOW.  Sub-prime mortgages and Balloon Payments are  Wonderful Ideas!  Why, Rush Limbaugh is the very Voice of Reason!  War IS Peace!  Freedom IS Slavery!  And Ignorance...dear Dread Lord Cthuhlu...Ignorance truly IS STRENGHT!

And then you die.

Youtube is Eating My Brain - Flying Cars

Not my best "work", but eh, we'll go with it.  First up is a hover car powered by firehoses, then comes a balloon shaped like a car, followed by a seven minute video of the Rinspeed Splash - a sports car that transforms into a hydroplane. Included because it "flies" over the water.  Yeh, like I said, this YiEMB is not my best.  Oh, and skip to about the 3:10 mark on the video, that's when it starts to get interesting.

The final video is of a little known, and even lesser successful, secret weapon of Nazi German, The Volkswaffe! (dun-dun-duuuuuun!)

Gulden Draak Lamp

Well, after months weeks days hours of hard work, I have finally (finally!) finished a project - turning an empty bottle of Gulden Draak beer into a lamp!  As I am not one to really plan these sorts of things in advance, I have no pictures but of the final product.

This was a very easy project whose biggest difficulty lay in drilling the hole needed to run the wires into the base of the lamp.

While the drilling itself was a slow process, requiring a steady and patient hand, it was actually trying to find a drillbit for glass that gave me fits. For once Lowes let me down, and I ended up finding one in Home Depot of all places.

While there I also picked up the socket, switch, threaded steel nipple, shade, and bulb.  All for about $12.  The cord I salvaged from something that didn't need it anymore (I can't remember what it was, and old humidifier maybe?), and the cork came from a bag of corks a roommate had on hand for one of her projects (a cork board made from corks; she didn't want the artificial ones, so I took them). 

In truth, I am not entirely pleased with the result.  The lamp shade is too short; the cork used to anchor the socket looks like crap; and the socket itself is too exposed.  Speaking of exposure, I had to use electrician's tape to cover the exposed terminals as 120V is not something that any sane person really wants to touch.  While my ex-boss may maintain that it merely tickles, I say it bloody well hurts!

These are minor problems, though, and will be rectified in future iterations of this project. Lampshades will be purchased from someplace with a decent selection, and not Home Despot; and I will either find a way to neatly trim the corks down, or go with something more along the lines of a rubber stopper used in laboratories.  As for the exposed wires on the socket, I probably should get a cup in which to place it.  This would not only serve to protect the wires, but would also look much better.

But all that is for next time.  For now, i have video games to play!